Fifty years later, fan recalls catching Roger Maris' 61st homer

Aristide Economopoulos/The Star-LedgerSal Durante (left) who caught Roger Maris' 61st home run in 1961, talks to Frank Prudente, the bat boy that day, while on tour at Yankee Stadium on Friday, nearly 50 years later.

NEW YORK — Just before the fourth inning of the game with the Red Sox on Oct. 1, 1961, Sal Durante offered to switch seats with his fiancée, Rosemarie, at Yankee Stadium.

After all, she’d sprung for the tickets — $2.50 apiece — for him, his cousin and his cousin’s girlfriend by using her hard-earned money from her job at Met Life.

There was no need to make her the odd one out in their right-field bleacher seats, which were grouped in threes. So, Durante agreed to move one row up and let her enjoy the company.

“He said, ‘I understand the game, I’ll sit up there alone and you sit with my cousin and his girlfriend,’” said Rosemarie, Sal’s wife of nearly 50 years.

The next inning, with Roger Maris at the plate, Sal followed closely the path of the pitch from Tracy Stallard toward the Yankees slugger, who was just one home run from breaking what was then the most sacred record in sports — Babe Ruth’s single-season mark of 60 home runs hit in 1927.

Durante watched as the line drive thwacked off Maris’ bat and made a beeline toward him. He jumped up onto his seat, thrust his right arm into the sky and the ball nestled securely into his palm. No pain, not a flinch. He turned to say something to Rosemarie, to tell her there was no way he could have caught Maris’ 61st homer if he had not taken her seat. He didn’t get the chance as he was whisked away by two Stadium security guards.

“I just reached as high as I could reach, and the ball ... it just landed right in the palm of my hand,” Durante said. “I just stood on my toes and it just went right there.”

That memory was evoked as Durante, 69, stood inside the new Yankee Stadium on Friday. Along with Rosemarie and Frank Prudente, the team’s bat boy from the 1961 season, they gathered on the cusp of that season’s 50th anniversary, to celebrate a moment that would change their lives forever.

They still remember everything about that day. How Prudente, then a 17-year-old, walked inside the Stadium through the right-field entrance, down the stairs and through the little doorway into the clubhouse, and how the team — charged up by a recent speech by Yogi Berra — was screaming into the World Series.

They still hang on to every word, albeit sparse, that Maris said.

“He told me to keep the baseball,” Durante said of the short exchange he had with the new home run king.

The moment is captured in a photo that sits near the elevator at the end of the upper-level Yankee Suites.

Durante, in a mangled pompadour haircut, stands while wearing a hesitant smile, an eagle tattoo displayed prominently across the left hand that grasps the historic baseball. His right arm, with the old pack of Camels rolled up in the sleeve, is wrapped around Maris.

“You went through as much pressure as Roger did that day,” Prudente said to Durante, making reference to the hordes of cameras that swelled around him.

And for a while, Durante’s life was a whirlwind. Fearing he’d be mugged, the Yankees didn’t allow him to leave the park with the ball that day. Durante insisted he mark it with his initials when he came back to get it a few weeks later. Reporters called his house at 3 a.m. to try to get pictures. Hordes greeted him at his Coney Island subway stop, cheering.

He eventually sold the ball to restaurateur Sam Gordon for $5,000. Gordon turned around and gave it to Maris.

But even without the piece of memorabilia, Durante’s life would forever be linked to that home run. He gave half the money to his parents to pull them out of debt, and put the other half into furnishing a house with Rosemarie, whom he married four weeks later.

He kept only a cigarette lighter that Maris gave him, with the Yankee insignia on the front, and Roger’s name on the back.